March 23, 2025
Jayson Tatum and the Celtics remained perfect on their road trip, claiming a 129-116 victory over the Trail Blazers on Sunday.
Here are the takeaways.
Tatum’s greatest superpower — one he really seems to have honed and perfected this year — is his ability to maintain complete control over the game, calmly watching and reacting to the defense as if he’s flipping through a rolodex of options and carefully picking the right one.
In the first half of Sunday’s win, Tatum primarily operated as a facilitator. He picked up five assists, the best of which was his second one just a few minutes into the game when he nearly made Donovan Clingan touch dirt before threading a tough bounce pass to Al Horford. That worked out well for the Celtics, since Sam Hauser and Payton Pritchard both got hot in the first half.
Then, in the third quarter, Tatum detonated. He started with a tough tap in, then knocked down a jumper, then buried his lone 3-pointer of the game through contact. Much like the first half, Tatum always looked like he was in complete control. At one point late in the quarter, he simply walked his way slowly toward the baseline with Matisse Thybulle marking him before calmly rising and knocking down a simple mid-range jumper.
Tatum was quieter in the fourth, but with just over a minute remaining, his Dirk Nowitzki-esque jumper put the Celtics up by 13 and was essentially the dagger. He finished just short of a triple-double, tallying 30 points, nine rebounds, and nine assists.
Tatum’s list of accolades at 27 is much longer than most players achieve in their careers, so it can be difficult to remember that he is just now entering his prime, but the regular season has been a 71-game showcase of his ability to control the game.
Sam Hauser is a great shooter, which is why it was baffling that there were no fewer than three 3-pointers on Sunday on which the Blazers were completely absent when Hauser caught the ball.
Hauser made eight 3-pointers on 10 attempts, so by no means were all of his 3-point attempts uncontested. Indeed, his last one was a tough triple floating to his left — the kind of shot that at one point wasn’t in his arsenal.
But the Blazers did themselves no favors by losing him repeatedly, which gave Hauser the chance to go off for 24 points, 8-for-11 from behind the arc. Hauser didn’t start the season particularly strong from deep, and his health issues may have played a role, but he seems to be rounding into shape at precisely the right time for the Celtics. A fiery stretch by Hauser has the potential to change a game — or even a series, if the fires stay lit for long enough — in the postseason.
Pritchard seems to enjoy playing in Portland, and he got a big pop from the crowd whenever he did something well. A native of nearby West Linn, Pritchard also starred at the University of Oregon, so his affinity with the area is well documented.
He did not, however, seem to have any love in his heart reserved for the current occupants of the Moda Center.
Pritchard picked up three of early fouls (“maybe I should stick to coming off the bench,” he quipped to Abby Chin postgame), so he didn’t have the opportunity to fully become Pro-Am P, as NBC Sports Boston broadcaster Drew Carter loves to call him. But he made Toumani Camari stumble and Jabari Walker outright fall, and he buried two 3-pointers within the span of 30 seconds at one point in the third quarter, waving disparagingly at the Blazers bench after the second.
Even when he doesn’t score like Pro-Am P, Portland P can still put on a show.
Coming out of college, Baylor Scheierman was intriguing not just because of his deep 3-point range, but because of the promise he showed in a number of other areas. Scheierman wasn’t just a gunner — he could also grab a rebound, dribble it up the floor himself and dish to an open teammate, showing the parallel skills that run between being a professional-quality basketball player and a star quarterback at the high-school level.
At the NBA level, of course, Scheierman’s job is much more complicated, which is why so much of his season has taken place in Maine. He needs to be able to hustle and defend before he can even think about cracking the Celtics’ rotation.
Still, one could be excused for watching Scheierman over the last couple of weeks with a raised eyebrow. After his breakout game from 3-point range, Scheierman has shown flashes in each of his most recent appearances, and in 26 minutes on Sunday, he made a pair of 3-pointers, but he also handed out three assists.
His third was the most impressive — driving into the paint, Scheierman faked a pass to the corner to J.D. Davison, then whirled mid-drive and fired a pass to Sam Hauser in the other corner as Hauser’s defender collapsed once it became clear that Scheierman’s pass to Davison was a fake. The result was a very easy triple for Hauser, who nailed it.
Don’t confuse Scheierman for Hauser, despite the 3-point shooting. Hauser, of course, is a far superior shooter, and a far superior NBA player as a whole. Scheierman has a long way to go before he can start tossing up movement threes like Hauser’s last make on Sunday.
But Scheierman also has a lot more potential as a ball-handler and passer than Hauser, which (at best) makes his potential to crack the Celtics’ rotation in the next year or two a very interesting storyline to follow and (at worst) could make the next couple weeks before the postseason a lot more fun to watch as the Celtics try to find productive ways to pass the time cruising into the second seed.
Let’s just take a second to acknowledge how good the Celtics have it at the big position. On a night when their starting center was out, they were able to start Al Horford (14 points, 6-for-12 shooting), and they played Luke Kornet (13 points, 6-for-6) 20 minutes to supplement him. Everyone else mixed and matched around the duo, who were both excellent in their own ways. Horford made a pair of 3-pointers. Kornet grabbed three offensive rebounds, dished a mid-air pass to Sam Hauser that looked a little funny given his proportions, and sprinted up the court barking like a dog (which the microphones caught) after a lefty put-back slam in the fourth quarter.
Before last year, the Celtics had a lot of question marks about the quality of their big rotation given that Horford was aging and Kristaps Porzingis was injury-prone, and it’s odd how the concerns about the big rotation have faded away entirely even though it has been entirely born out as true both that Horford is aging and Porzingis is injury-prone.
With 11 games remaining, the Celtics, who have won five games in a row and who boast a .732 winning percentage, are again on pace to win 60.
That number, of course, shouldn’t matter much in the long run. The Celtics remain five games out of first (and they might not really want that path to the conference finals all that much anyway), and they are 7.5 games ahead of the Knicks in the second. The second seed is almost assuredly theirs, whether or not they cross the 60-win threshold.
Still, 60 wins might simply fall into their lap, especially if their mix-and-match units continue to look as good as they did on Sunday. The Celtics have the third-easiest schedule remaining according to Tankathon, and their most difficult games ahead are the Knicks (whom they have handled well all year), the Grizzlies (who have been playing .500 basketball in their last 10 games), the Kings (who have been playing .500 basketball all season), and the Suns twice (who are in a fight for their play-in lives against the husk of the Dallas Mavericks that remains under Nico Harrison). The rest of their schedule is littered with lottery teams.
After all the hand-wringing in the middle of the season when they slogged their way through January, the Celtics are absolutely fine as the postseason approaches.
Brew your strongest coffee and drink it a little later than usual: The Celtics will take on the Kings at 10 p.m. EST Monday before they travel to Phoenix for Wednesday’s game, their third in four nights. They will then have two days off before wrapping up their road trip with games against the Spurs on Saturday and Grizzlies on Monday.
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